Alternative Solutions

 Alternative Solutions 

 Tired of being at the mercy of major corporations?

We support the underdog, helping to prove the underdog can do many of the same things the big dogs can.

How does this affect our customers?

Use of alternative options sometimes allows us to lower our rates for the same services others may require higher rates because of their additional overhead. Depending on the service, you may not even notice the difference in the end results or it's possible there is no alternate option and we just may not provide certain services.

Technology - Hardware

Sometimes hardware vendors may only support certain major corporations and their products but not officially support others. This is the case for certain vendors who only want to support the largest market segment and not any of the smaller segments. Also, sometimes vendors will use proprietary components in their products, such as with some computers, forcing consumers to upgrade through the vendor.

Technology - Software

Piracy of expensive software has become a huge issue for major corporations such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Intuit costing them a substantial amount of money so many major corporations such as these have been using various anti-piracy methods including activation and registration to thwart piracy. However, this method typically requires them to maintain an activation server or your software may become useless! This means if they decide to quit supporting old versions of their software 5 or 10 years later, you may not be able to re/install it forcing you to upgrade your expensive software. And with the requirement of registration, sometimes software can be transferred, but other times, you may not even be able to sell or otherwise get rid of software you purchased.

After years of experience using popular software, we've decided not to support many of those software packages directly anymore. However, there are some alternatives to some of these major corporations popular applications that include some of the core key features of the popular version of the software, but typically at a substantially lower price and without all of the activation requirements. Of course, most of the time the alternative is not always 100% compatible, but does usually include the typical features most consumers use. The look and feel may be slightly different and require a modest learning curve, but alternative vendors usually create their applications to have a similar look and feel to minimize this learning curve when possible.

Our solution to this is to support a variety of open source software packages that may serve as alternatives to many popular commercial software packages.The following are some examples: